It is commonly accepted that Shakespeare’s earliest essays in tragic form are Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet – accepted, that is, among those who allow that Shakespeare was responsible for Titus Andronicus. But few critics, even among the accepters, seem willing to go beyond the merely chronological point to take up the critical consequence: that we might expect to be able to analyse here an early but characteristic Shakespearian mode of tragedy. The two plays are so obviously unlike one another that it is hard even to think of adding them together to make up any description of a unified mode. Whatever the reason, it is a clear critical fact that these plays are not normally considered together, or even apart, in a description of Shakespearian Tragedy. Shakespeare, it is implied, had to throw away this dispersed prentice work, set it against experience rather than achievement, when he began to compose the sequence of truly ‘Shakespearian’ tragedies beginning with Julius Caesar and growing out of the political interests of the English history plays.

These pre-judgements bear more heavily against Titus Andronicus than Romeo and Juliet, for Romeo has, whatever its generic implication, the refuge of being a 'well-loved' play, where Titus can only be called 'much disliked'. I begin, however, by assuming an equality of interest and importance, taking it that in both plays Shakespeare was writing as well as he knew how. The subsequent reputations of the plays may be thought to tell us more securely about audience preferences in the period between Shakespeare and the present than about the author's intention. My concern in this paper is not with differences of valuation but with the formal similarities and relationships that can be established between the two tragedies.

Two works of major importance must be treated first. With the publication of his seventh volume Geoffrey Bullough brings his immense collection of Shakespeare’s possible source material within sight of completion. Only the last volume, on the Romances, remains to be published. Like its predecessors, this is a volume which any serious student must have ready to hand. It is particularly convenient to have in one volume such materials as Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest as well as the later Fratricide Punished for Hamlet; Cinthio, Bandello and Richard Knolles for Othello; the Annesly case, Holinshed, Higgins, Spenser, Sidney, Harsnett and The True Chronicle History for King Lear; Holinshed, Buchanan and Leslie for Macbeth. Professor Bullough provides much more than a collection of the standard sources. He has revived the suggestion that the play-within-the-play in Hamlet contains elements originally derived from some account of the murder of Francesco Maria I, Duke of Urbino. Two passages are included, Luigi Gonzaga’s protestation of his innocence and Pietro Aretino’s apology to Gonzaga. In general this volume gives considerable weight to the possible effect of contemporary historical events. The marriage of James VI and Anne of Denmark is considered as a possible influence on the early play on the Hamlet story and current political issues may have been glanced at in the referrences to England and Poland.

That the title Much Ado About Nothing been associated with a pun — so that, in effect, something can come ex nihilo — has become a commonplace in Shakespearian scholarship; however, the word-play upon ‘noting’ and ‘nothing’ (as in the Don Pedro/Balthasar dialogue in act II) is seemingly too slight for considering that an entire play, or even its title, would have been built upon it. Though this word-play is enhanced through the added meaning of noting — that is, making notes in the ‘immediate context’ of sounding notes in music, but also in the ‘larger context’ of taking notes, or eavesdropping — I submit that the explanation is unsatisfactory for justifying the title, which may unfortunately retain the general impression of flippancy. I propose, however, a more agreeable solution which need not make the audience feel ‘taken in’ or embarrassed by seeming insincerity or flippancy: it is one that builds upon the inherent insouciance of the title, without having to apologize for it in the least. My view is that the title as we have it was originally the play’s subtitle. At some point, then, the main title got lost. If so, the lost title may have been Love’s Labour’s Won, for this is the only title of Shakespeare’s which we have without a play to to go with it from this period of his career. Since a number of Shakespeare’s other comedies have similarly ‘flippant’ subtitles, the interpretation here offered would not be setting a new precedent.

Generally speaking, Richard III carries on the theme of guilt and retribution that in one way or another links eight of Shakespeare’s history plays, and concludes the series with the theme of order restored. Motivated by a totally unconscionable ambition for power, the protagonist intensifies the bloody disorder which has plagued England since the deposition of Richard II until he becomes subject to retribution himself at the hands of Richmond, whose success at Bosworth Field is the prelude to peace and unity in England. The deposition of Richard II had led to a division between the houses of York and Lancaster, and this division was responsible for the moral chaos that afflicted England during the Wars of the Roses. When, in Richard II, Carlyle protests against the deposition and prophesies its effect—

-he is, in effect, partially echoing or anticipating Richmond's choric statement at the end of Richard III that the marriage of himself and Elizabeth, 'the true succeeders of each royal house', would bring an end to the unnatural division of brother and brother, and father and son. 'The fair conjunction' of 'the white rose and the red' would, he asserted, unify all that 'divided York and Lancaster, / Divided in their dire division' (v, v, 19, 20, 27-8).

Though the reach may exceed the grasp, an attempt to formulate the nature of Shakespearian tragedy is an ambitious enterprise. I. Morris and R. Nevo undertake it from very different points of view.

Morris sees Shakespearian tragedy in a religious perspective, although unlike most attempts to Christianise its meaning his argument does not depend on allegory or on explicit allusions to Christian doctrine within the plays. On the contrary, he insists upon the essentially secular nature of tragic experience, conceiving tragedy and Christian belief alike to be grounded upon the universal human condition in which worldly aspirations must inevitably end in failure and disaster, for 'in a Divine universe, every human aspiration short of the desire for God must come to naught'. 'The high duty of tragedy, in fact,' writes Morris, 'is to present the situation that faith must overcome.' It is the need for revelation, rather than the revelation itself, that he would have us recognise in the tragedies.

This argument, carefully stated and elaborately documented (though with relatively little direct reference to the plays themselves), seems open to question at several points. In stressing the basis of tragedy in human experience, for instance, Morris tends to obscure the distinction between life and art, and to overlook the fact that comedy has the same basis. Moreover, to describe tragedy as a 'confirmation', albeit implicit, of Christian truth contradicts the primacy and autonomy that are claimed for experience, and suggests instead that the eye of faith can only look upon tragedy as a mirror of its own preconceptions.

Not to take the term in too narrowly confessional a sense we may identify three Puritans in Shakespeare: they are Shylock, Malvolio, and Angelo. The problem of usury in Shakespeare's time, dramatized in the relation of Shylock to Antonio, is one that had arisen specifically as a result of the new Calvinist social ethics. The capitalist individualism of Shylock and his distance from the aristocratic world of Belmont indicate that he represents to an important degree the new Puritan middle class and their problems. 'Lord Angelo', we are told, is 'precise', i.e., a precisian. As for Malvolio, he is indeed once actually named a Puritan by Maria (though she soon afterwards modifies the charge) but even without this we would have recognized him as a Puritan by his kill-joy attitude to the Twelfth Night celebrations of the merry folk. ' Thinkst thou because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale'-could stand as a warning against what Puritanism threatened to do in the seventeenth century to the tradition of Merrie England.

In The Grass of Oblivion, Valentin Katayev recalls how Meyerhold laid sudden plans for a new theatre:

In King Lear and Macbeth, in different ways, the hero by his own actions sets tragic forces in motion; in Othello the hero is gradually ‘wrought’ to destructive passion; but when Hamlet begins, someone other than the hero has already violated the natural order of the kingdom, and the hero, although profoundly disturbed, is only partially aware of the evil which is entrenched. Hamlet’s original ‘intent’ to go back to Wittenberg seems to reflect a feeling of helplessness and a desire simply to escape from Elsinore as it now is. Agreeing to stay, he rightly senses that ‘it is not, nor it cannot come to good’ (I, 2). Thus, for the hero of Hamlet, the situation is from the very start one of tragic disruption: to see the play in terms of a conflict which shatters the prince when he is faced with life in the Denmark of Claudius constitutes a key approach — not a new one, but, as I hope to demonstrate, one which it is illuminating to carry further. In this play Shakespeare creates and intensifies the sense of tragic conflict by particularly subtle and oblique presentation of concepts of the universe, the state, and man, which were familiar in his day. As they are also familiar to all students of Shakespeare I wish to draw attention only to points most relevant to subsequent discussion.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the way he has managed to transform a crude Norseman of the heroic age into a Renaissance prince of such impressive presence. Speculation about how it was done has led commentators a merry dance through sixteenth-century history and ideas. The place of Erasmus there, which no one familiar with the century would wish to dispute, has not really been taken into sufficient account in such speculation, considering first, how inescapable his influence was in general, and second, how much evidence there is in the plays that Shakespeare was familiar with his work — and especially with the Moriae Encomium. Positive proof of first-hand acquaintance has, of course, been lacking; but circumstantial evidence is of sufficient weight to command attention. The Moriae Encomium was a grammar-school text in the 1570s and 1580s, and it is perfectly possible that Shakespeare knew it as early as that, having perhaps been set to translate it himself. Schoolboys who were able to get hold of a copy must have been tempted to consult the Chaloner translation as a crib (it was first published in 1549, with subsequent editions in about 1560 and 1577); but there is, of course, no reason to think that Shakespeare did, though in later years he may well have known it. Whatever the truth of that, his acquaintance with the Moriae Encomium is supported by a wide range of what seem to be direct echoes of not only its thinking, but also its illustrative material. To mention only a few of the more obvious which have drawn notice.

gle: I've got an image of you - as an actress, that is - as a sort of loner. Although at the time of talking you are associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company, when I look back on your career I get the impression that you like to cut loose from time to time. I mean that you don't seem to like to be closely tied to any company style or ensemble for too long. Is this impression correct?

jd: Yes, it is correct. I think it doesn't evolve out of wanting specifically to be on my own - to be not connected with something. It doesn't really involve that. Very early on someone once said to my agent, 'Well we can't cast Judi in that, because that's a part for a leading lady and she's a soubrette.' I'm not going to be that. I've never wanted to be cast as one type of person. For instance I've lately read it twice that people have a rather serious image of me. They didn't use the word 'chilling' but they meant a rather serious, rather tragedienne person. Well that is so unlike me. I think things most probably happen most successfully in comedy, funnily enough. So, Gareth, it's not so much not wanting to be tied down to a company, it's rather not wanting to be tied down to an image. And so if anything like Cabaret and playing Sally Bowles came up, that was just like getting the most wonderful present, and everything else beside it appeared dross. Each time some kind of challenge like that comes up and somebody takes a gamble on me, then I want to do it.

Echoes of Tamburlaine in Shakespeare’s Henry V have frequently been noted by scholars, but without a careful probing of their significance. It has been remarked, for instance, that in Henry’s summons to Harfleur ‘we seem to hear the voice of Tamburlaine himself’, and that the play’s opening prologue seems to conjure up a hero sprung from ‘the Marlovian sphere’. If so, what was Shakespeare trying to do? Was he merely taking advantage of Elizabethan popular taste for Conqueror plays and borrowing haphazardly from well-known prototypes? Or was he intending, rather, some comparison or contrast? In G. Wilson Knight’s view, Shakespeare was here attempting to ‘Christianize military conquest’ by offering an epic blend of Christian virtue with martial prowess; he was holding up an ideal king ‘in opposition to a Tamburlaine or to Hitler’s tyranny’. And a similar explanation has been given by Irving Ribner: ‘Henry V may well be called Shakespeare’s Christian Tamburlaine, noteworthy for his mercy rather than cruelty, and for his submission to the will of God rather than rebellion against it.’ Superficially, perhaps so, for on Henry’s part there is no overt blasphemy, no threatening to storm heaven such as we see in 2 Tamburlaine. But whether Henry is noteworthy for mercy seems to me questionable, as is likewise the genuineness of his submission to God. Is the ethic we see practiced by Henry really Christian, or is it so only by an invalid claim? After all, Tamburlaine too talked a good deal about obeying God.

Many critical studies of Richard II, and a surprising number of productions, start from a curious assumption: that Shakespeare wrote, and asked his leading actor to star in, a long play dominated by a character whose main effect on the audience was to be one of boredom, embarrassment, or at best contemptuous pity. If Richard’s part is not a good one, the play is simply not worth seeing; and ‘good’, in theatrical terms, means not necessarily virtuous but interesting. I want to argue that Richard is in fact rather less virtuous than has often been thought, and, just for that reason, a ‘better’ dramatic character.

Much of our difficulty with the play is a difficulty of knowing what moral connotations to attach to its highly rhetorical language. It is useful to be reminded by R. F. Hill that 'apparently self-conscious control of language does not, of itself, indicate dispassion and triviality in character', especially since he goes on to show that self-conscious language is by no means confined to Richard. Yet there is no doubt that elaborate language is used as a substitute for action and, to that extent, is a symbol of weakness. 'Give losers leave to talk' is an Elizabethan proverb, and in the first two acts of the play the long speeches do in fact belong to the 'losers'-Mowbray, Gaunt, York, the Duchess of Gloucester, and Bolingbroke.

The history of the Queen’s Men spans the years 1583–92. After that date the remnants of what was for a time the first acting company in the land are like the down-at-heels players in Histrio-mastix ‘that travel with pumps full of gravell’ carrying their few props and costumes, and performing ‘base-brown-paper-stuffe’. The decade in which the Queen’s Men were most influential coincides so exactly with the most obscure period of William Shakespeare’s life that the possibility of Shakespeare’s having received his introduction to the theater as a trainee with them is worthy of close scrutiny.

Shakespeare probably joined a troupe of actors sometime shortly after leaving Stratford about the mid 1580s; in any case, his talent and success were sufficiently recognized by 1592 for him to be attacked in print as an upstart, 'the onely Shakescene in a country'. But what company did he join and in what capacity? J. Q. Adams suggests that Shakespeare received his training with Pembroke's Men as a hireling, first cast in minor roles - this, at least, would parallel the careers of such actor-playwrights as Thomas Heywood and Samuel Rowley. A. F. Pollard claimed Shakespeare was a member of Leicester's company about 1587; T. W. Baldwin, interpreting the 'Shakescene' passage, finds it an attack on Shakespeare and his company, Strange's Men.

The comedy known as the ‘old Timon’ is of interest largely because of its possible connection with Timon of Athens. Numerous similarities between the two plays have been traced to Lucian’s dialogue Misanthropos: Timon’s extravagant spending; his payment of a friend’s debt to release the friend from prison; his loss of wealth and subsequent discovery of gold in the earth; the reappearance of his parasitic friends to feign generosity when he no longer needs it; his driving them away with a spade; and the final implication that his prodigality was unwise and his choice of friends, indiscriminate. All these similarities suggest that both Shakespeare and the anonymous author (or authors; the MS., written in alternating Italian and Secretary hands, indicates that the play may have been a collaboration) had either direct or indirect access to Lucian.

But the two plays have a number of similarities which cannot be accounted for by their sharing of a source - neither Lucian, nor Plutarch, nor any Renaissance treatment of the Timon legend.3 Among these similarities are a strong emphasis on Timon in prosperity (three acts in each play); scenes in which his parasitic friends refuse to reciprocate his generosity; a mock-banquet at which Timon, destitute, rails at them (he pelts them with stones painted as artichokes in Timon; in Timon of Athens, stones undisguised); and the presence of a faithful steward who remonstrates against his extravagance, follows him into exile, and helps him to drive off the parasites.

The survey of this year’s work in Shakespearian textual studies may well take as its point of departure the papers delivered by Charlton Hinman and Fredson Bowers to the World Shakespeare Congress at Vancouver in September 1971, both of which take stock of the situation then current and concern themselves with the immediate prospect as well as with the vital needs of future editors of Shakespeare. Hinman recapitulates the major developments from 1964 to 1971, coming to rest on D. F. McKenzie’s ‘Printers of the Mind’ and assessing the damage sustained by the structure of bibliographical analysis of the early texts as the dust and smoke clear after that most severe assault on many of the assumptions underlying such analysis. He finds those parts of the structure most haunted by Shakespearians among the least shaken, namely, the identification of compositors on internal evidence and the establishment of their characteristics, the demonstration of setting by formes in the printing of the First Folio and the currency in the Elizabethan period of methods of proof-correction less rigorous than those described by Moxon in the 1680s. Points that he is willing to concede include the normality of concurrent printing in the Elizabethan period as well as later and the consequent invalidity of analyses, on internal evidence alone, of the interrelation of rates of composition and rates of presswork.

When T. S. Eliot so flamboyantly denounced Titus Andronicus as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’, he naturally invited rebuttal. But while an apology for Titus can certainly be erected, the fact is that the imputed stupidities of the tragedy attract far more interest than any of its mediocre achievements. Indeed, if we would only persist in the study of those very ‘stupidities’ that many critics would rather forget, we would discover that the ways in which the figurative language imitates the literal events of plot makes The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus a significant dramatic experiment. In the play’s spectacularly self-conscious images that keep pointing at the inventive horrors in the plotting, in its wittily-obsessive allusions to dismembered hands and heads, and in the prophetic literalness of its metaphors, Titus reveals its peculiar literary importance.

The peculiar language of Titus Andronicus is particularly apparent in the literalness of its central metaphors. In a play preeminently concerned with the mutilation of the human body, Titus makes nearly sixty references, figurative as well as literal, to the word 'hands' and eighteen more to the word 'head', or to one of its derivative forms. Far from being divorced from the action as many critics claim, the figurative language points continually toward the lurid events that govern the tragedy.

Giles E. Dawson and Joseph Q. Adams, while working on Shakespeare’s autograph uncovered in 1938 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in a copy of William Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568), expressed their continued puzzlement at why this book was ever in Shakespeare’s possession or under what specific circumstances the dramatist would have encountered William Lambarde. Dawson felt the book was a peculiar one for Shakespeare to have: ‘ . . . the only one [possibility] remaining, is that William Shakespeare wrote his signature on this title page, perhaps because he owned the book — a strange volume indeed for his library’. Adams accounted for the strangeness by indicating the likelihood that some other writing on the page, stating that the book should not be lost, was Lambarde’s; thus evidencing that this was a presentation copy from the author to Shakespeare. Adams then opined,